Mom gets her son’s military working dog after her Marine son is killed in Afghanistan

Sgt. Joshua Ashley and his military police dog Sirius were best friends.“He goes, “Mom, … he went to sleep in the bed with me and keeps pushing me and pushing me and pushing me so he takes over the whole bed,’ I had to make him get off the bed,” Tammie Ashley said of her son.

The last time Ashley spoke to her son in Afghanistan, he had a request. ” ‘I’m gonna have you take him until I get to where I’m going or when I get out,’ ” Ashley said her son told her shortly before he was killed. Nearly four years later, Ashley made good on that promise to her son. Sirius retired from the Marines and was given to her, and she picked him up at the Ontario airport.

“It was the strangest thing,” Ashley said. “He was smelling my face like he was going to lick it, and it was almost like ‘I recognize you.’ Like, ‘You were Josh’s mom.’ ”